Why reading beyond academic books matters

Sanabam Lamyanba Meitei *

32nd Imphal Book Fair at State Central Library Complex, Keishampat in December 2025 :: Pix - Derrick Khuman

Since the education system has been introduced in human society, we all seek to gain new knowledge in one way or another. From the time a child is born till the time he leaves this earth, learning is a part of it. Yet we barely touch the surface of learning and understanding of life through the academic books that we use today.

Academic books are great for helping people understand the pattern of learning, how to read, how to write, and how to analyze things. To be precise, an academic book's syllabus provides us with structured knowledge about things that are with us every day and beyond.

Academic knowledge provides the complex realities that we see around us with a structured knowledge that is easy for us to grasp. They turn the ideas that we can’t understand into frameworks, definitions, theories, laws, or models. What runs around in our minds that we can’t understand is turning into clarity through academic study.

Academic books teach us to think more logically, critically, or clearly by introducing us to debates, me- thodologies, theories, etc. They make us learn how to make an argument, think logically about a problem, question arguments, and analyze evidence more easily. What the academic is doing is teaching us both how to think and what to think.

The academic reading demands focus, consistency, and patience to create mental stamina to build an intellectual discipline, which is very important for both professional and academic environments. It equips us with the essential skills and knowledge for our future endeavors, which is what the current job market demands today.

Academic books have a certain syllabus, certain units, and certain knowledge for a certain age that the education system thinks is enough for people's small brains. And it’s good till a certain stage, indeed, we can’t drink a gallon of milk in one day to become healthy, rather than drinking one glass of milk daily.

Academic books are more credible and have more authority than some random online sources that are available freely. Academic books or contents are often the result of years of proper research from every corner of the world.

Yet the academic books fall short in helping us understand life and navigate the chaos of life. They help us to understand the system and structure, but they do not provide us with how to cope with the uncertain things, lived experiences, roller coaster of emotions that happen in our lives. What they fail to address is that life is not a syllabus; it’s often unpredictable, and we can’t do anything about it.

As we all know, the academic books tell us the standardized form of the complexities of reality, it fails to teach us the taste of life. The academic books sometimes feel like not acknowledge that real life is messy and inconsistent.

Academic books focus more on data, facts, and evidence, and fall short when it comes to the subjective point of view and personal experience. It fails to realize that not all meaningful things in life can be measured. It’s life, not a set of data. Life includes biases, feelings, and often irrational decisions that teach us that we’re still human frequently.

Academia is not like that; we can acknowledge that there are some criteria to learn about the particular subject to know the knowledge that is taught in that field. Academic studies categorize different subjects and different studies, but life doesn’t categorize anything; good or bad, it’s all part of life. We have to accept that knowing a particular theory or psychology model doesn’t necessarily mean understanding emotions.

Structured texts can’t teach us about grief, loneliness, anxiety, or depression; that’s really necessary to know in this new world. Academic books aim for clear and exact answers, but life teaches us about uncertain and mostly unresolved experiences.

Life doesn’t have some models that we can learn from. In life, we learned more from failure than success, which might not be the same in academic texts. Academic books often fail to teach us even how to manage a conflict. I think “What we learn academically prepares us for systems, not for life itself.”

As we all read somewhere that ‘ A reader lives a thousand lives’. How would we live that life, where we only focus on academic readings? Literature or novels often focus on the human emotions that we barely understand, inner thoughts that we always fight inside our heads, and personal struggles that we rarely show to others.

The authors who often choose to write novels or literature, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, always have a certain truth that tells us how they feel, not just what they do. They don’t follow certain theories to reach the conclusion. They tell us the lived reality, not some frameworks only.

Why do we read books other than academic books? Sometimes it’s because we see ourselves in the characters, we see ourselves in the struggles, we feel like we’re living the stories. Reading novels or literature helps to analyze and process our feelings, recognize our own emotions that we often fail to do so.

Emotional awareness is what we need when we fail to acknowledge our own emotions, those feelings that we think that we’re the only one feeling that way. Emotional depth and self-understanding can be learned from such books.

Non-academic books sometimes allow us to experience other lived realities and understand the different perspectives that we can use in times of need. Reading books from different lives also teaches us the different identities one has, the different cultures that people lived in, and the different struggles to achieve the end goal of every living soul. Reading books becomes a way of living, different multiple lives to understand our own life.

Unlike academic texts, it doesn’t have fixed answers. Life doesn’t have fixed answers, and non-academic books, such as a novel, often leave space for our own doubt, interpretation, and time to reflect on our own. It helps us to realize that not everything in life has to reach a goal or resolve to make it meaningful.

To solve problems in life, we need to come up with different ways, and non- academic texts often help us to see the different possibilities about certain problems that we come across in life. They often explore the moral complexity that humans have, existential crisis, guilt, and the conflicting viewpoints that we frequently have.

Non-academic books help the readers to improve their visualization and imaginative powers. Like when we read books about an empire or a king, we automatically visualize the environment or the kingdom in our mind, which eventually strengthens our creative and abstract thinking. The readers are not more readers; they are becoming part of the meaning-making process of the texts.

Reading them is totally our choice, our own will, our personal, and our reflective way, not driven by marks, grades, exams, or the outcomes. Reading doesn’t give us answers right away, they give us more understanding.

Academic reading helps us to understand the theories, models, and facts that inform, not reflect. Knowing something and under- standing its meaning are totally different. Academic systems fail to bring out emotional awareness.

What we really need in life is internal clarity. In academic answers, we have to give the right and wrong, or fixed solutions, while life talks more about uncertainty and open-ended situations. Non-academic readings help us engage the diverse human emotions, which eventually help us to become more human. Reading only academic books leads to narrow thinking, rigidity, and a more mechanical approach.

Academic reading is necessary to understand the basic not sufficient to understand life. We need to read broadly and beyond academic books. Real learning comes from using both fields, the structured academic knowledge and lived experience knowledge from the non-academic readings. In this new world, we see people reading only academic books, which leads to limited perspectives and shallow engagement with life.

So, read beyond academic books, explore literature, novels, fictions, and non-fictions, or anything that you want to read, just make it personal. It’s not a mandatory or minimum requirement, but a choice to explore the thousands of lives while we’re living our lives. A society that doesn’t read deeply won’t think deeply.

“To understand the real meaning of life, we need to read what we’re required to understand.”